MYTH: Hamas Renounced Terrorism

The IDF found a Hamas rocket launcher hidden in a Gaza school. Hamas hides its weapons and fires its rockets from schools, hospitals, and other civilian areas (photo credit: IDF Blog).

FACT: Hamas’s leadership has in no way renounced terror and continues to advocate for holy war (jihad) against Israel. Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, routinely calls for violence against Israel, heralding the next generation of Palestinian-Arab children as “the generation of the missile, the tunnel, and suicide operations.” Hamas media outlets and mosques tell children to shoot Jews and to die in order to kill as many Israelis as possible. Its schools teach children that Israel must be destroyed and that it is every child’s duty to destroy it.

Hamas leaders regularly call for the genocide of the Jewish people and the destruction of Israel. Hamas’s charter states, “The time will not come until the Muslims will fight the Jews; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” The charter also states that Jews are Nazis and that “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”

Hamas also operates paramilitary summer camps, training children to become fighters. Hamas trains these child soldiers to fight and kill Jews and Israelis. In 2014, Hamas celebrated its 13,000 graduates.

Hamas has launched roughly 19,000 rockets at Israeli civilians since 2001. In the summer of 2014, Hamas terrorists kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers and launched 4,000 rockets at Israel’s major population centers.